The soul is supposed not to leave the body for three days. The first night an angel whispers in the ear of the deceased, “What is your faith?” and the soul must answer, “I am a Moslem.” The angel again whispers, “In whom do you believe?” and the soul will answer, “I believe in the One God,” and the third question is, “And who is your prophet?” and the answer, “Mohammed is the Prophet of God,” allows the soul to be left in peace. Three days, seven days, and forty days after death memorials are held at the home of the late deceased, when friends call and offer their sympathy, and food and money are distributed in great quantities to the beggars. At times of festivity or mourning the poor come in crowds, and are never turned away empty-handed. There are practically no almshouses in Egypt, nor any organized charity, but Mohammedans are commanded to give one-twentieth of their income to the poor. Whether they follow this law exactly or not, they are very generous to those in need, not giving with much discernment, but always willing to drop a coin into the outstretched hand or to fill the empty bowl. One cannot judge of the life of the average Egyptian woman by living only in Cairo, where the note of modernism has sounded with such call as to reach even the inner rooms of the harim, but in the smaller towns of Egypt one sees the real Egyptian life, untouched by the customs of alien lands. [Illustration: CHILDREN ON THE NILE. To face p. 66.] I visited in a home on the banks of the Nile and watched with interested eyes the life around me: saw the mother attend to her household duties in the morning, giving the servants directions for the day’s work, measuring and weighing out the stores to the cook, and taking his accounts as he came from the market-place with the day’s provisions. An old blind woman came in the morning to give the children their lesson in the Koran. She would start a surah, then the children would repeat the remaining verses in a sing-song voice, the slightest break in the intonation calling forth a rebuke from the leader, whose nodding head kept time to the chant. At nine o’clock the older children took their books under their arms and started for the village school, in the same noisy manner as do our children at home. I watched the fellaheen as they lifted the water from the river to irrigate the thirsty fields, and saw the black-robed women filling their water-jars and placing them upon their heads with a beautiful sweeping gesture, walk gracefully away to their little mud huts that could scarcely be distinguished from the sands around them. Trains of camels passed our wall on their way to the distant city, and the shepherd boys drove their flocks of sheep and goats in search of pasture. I remembered Browning’s beautiful David, who sang:—